


Dreaming is Free

by MooseFeels



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Exhaustion, Hurt/Comfort, Look don't worry about it okay, Omega Poe, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-19 17:24:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5975350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe's from a different world, and has some different needs than anyone Rey and Finn have met before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Finn’s stretching. His muscles in his back are stiff. They’ve healed, but there’s an enormous amount of scar tissue and he’s got to work. He’s got to make sure it’s stretched and loose, he’s got to keep it from shrinking and from losing any elasticity. It wants to become tight, to pull his body inward on itself, to leave him hunched and sore. 

Finn’s stretching, following the guide that a med-droid printed out for him, when Poe walks into the room, barefoot.

Poe drops his boots onto the floor with a kind of heavy, final sound. He rolls his shoulders and closes his eyes. Looks up at the ceiling.

“Poe?” Finn asks.

Finn doesn’t respond.

“Poe?” Finn asks, a little louder. “Are you okay? Are you in there?”

Poe’s eyes flutter open and he turns, looks at Finn.

“Why are you in my room?” he asks. His voice sounds tight and sore. 

“Poe, you’re not in your room,” he says. “Are you okay?” he repeats.

Poe closes his eyes again. They look glassy. He looks  _ flushed _ . 

“Can you guide me back to my room?” He says. “I think I went on autopilot and just...misplaced myself.”

“Do you need to go to medbay?” Finn asks. “You don’t look great.”   
Poe shakes his head, leaning heavily against Finn’s side. He’s  _ warm _ to the touch, but his skin is sticky with sweat. His body, the weight of it and heat of it, it all feels like Poe has been running. His curly hair is caught with sweat, sticks to his forehead. So close to him, Finn can smell the scent of his sweat- it’s not  _ bad _ , actually. It’s earthy and musty but not in an unpleasant way. Something to it that makes Finn feel very grounded and _ safe _ .

“No,” Poe answers. His voice is definitely hoarse and a little too soft. “BB-8 will know what to do. I guess you were still out when this happened last time.”

Finn helps him shuffle down the hall, to the other side of the barracks, to his own room. He helps him open the door and slip inside. Poe collapses, heavily, onto his bed and  _ groans _ .

BB-8 lets out a song of whistles and hums and beeps. 

“Yeah,” Poe replies. “Yeah, that’s it. Can you-”   
BB-8 interrupts and then wheels off.

“Poe,” Finn says, “are you sure you’re okay? Can I help you?”   
“It’s my cycle,” Poe says. He struggles his shoulders out of his flightsuit without sitting up. “It happens. BB-8 and medbay know what to do. I’m just-”

“Your cycle?” Finn asks. He feels his brow furrow. 

Poe sighs. “It’s hard to explain,” he says. He sounds like he’s trying to be rational, to be clear, but he’s  _ tired.  _  “And I’m- it makes me- I can explain later. In a few days, okay? But I just-” he sighs, heavily. “I just need space.”

Finn nods, dutifully, and BB-8 wheels back just as he turns to leave. 

He wishes he knew better what to do.

He wishes Rey were here.

Finn walks back to his room- which has two bunks in it, presumably because Rey will be in it when she gets back. She left, before Finn woke up. She left, and Finn feels her absence like he feels the loss of a limb. He didn’t think he could be so tied up, so  _ attached _ to someone he barely knew, but there her absence is. A weight.

She’d know what to do. She’d know what it means. She’d know.

Finn stretches.

* * *

 

Poe feels his cycle come over him all of the sudden while he’s doing checks to go into the air. He’s checking a coolant line that’s been troubling him for the past few weeks when he feels that sensation like someone has dumped a pail of cold water over him. He feels it race over his skin, across his nerves, leaving lines of goosebumps in its wake and then the hot red flush. Elevated blood pressure. Sweat. 

“ _ Kriff _ ,” Poe swears, and he reaches into the cockpit to flick off the ignition sequences. He can’t fly like this; already he feels his thinking go simultaneously too fast and too slow. He feels his skin go too tight and the rest of the world go too loud and sharp. 

He doesn’t even realize where he’s going, or that he’s there, until Finn announces it for him.

Finn guides him back to his own bunk when he asks. 

“Your cycle?”

Of  _ course _ he doesn’t know- of course he’s never encountered the specific biological quirks people from the Yavin system pick up- of  _ course _ . But Poe’s too muddy headed to explain it right now, and he’s thankful that Finn is willing to leave him be with it.

Kalonia’s got him on a mild sedative- it puts him under for the worst of it and keeps him from making a fool of himself. He’s glad that he’d caught it coming before it got  _ bad _ \- if he’s already in so deep that he’d walked to Finn (to  _ safety) _ absently while cycling, god knows what he’d done once the other stuff had kicked in. He fumbles the pill out of BB-8’s small drawer and the droid  _ chirps! _ and then rolls out of the room. Gives Poe some privacy and stands guard.

The smell stuff. The- the slick stuff. The  _ want _ .

Poe feels himself get hard and he  _ moans _ . He finishes shucking off his flightsuit and he jacks his cock a few times. 

He comes, and the adrenaline kicks the sedative just right and he feels himself go limp, go tired, and he falls asleep. 


	2. Chapter 2

Finn sees Poe three days later, in the mess, no longer looking sweaty and flushed, his hair wet from a fresh shower. He’s poking at a bowl of something absently, reading over some sheets. 

“Poe!” Finn exclaims, happy to see him. “You’re okay!”

Poe looks up suddenly, and he smiles, widely. “Finn!” He answers. “Yeah, I’m fine- I’m fine. Sorry I haven’t had a chance to see you yet, some stuff piled up while I was out of commission and I’ve been busy all day.”

Finn sits down next to him with bowl of his own porridge and a protein shake- anything to help him build back muscle. 

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, I’ve been worried,” Finn says. It’s true. He’s wanted to come by, to see him, to say something. But he also hasn’t wanted to interrupt him- whatever it was seemed personal.

That and BB-8 always chased him from the door when he approached it. 

“Yeah,” Poe says. “Yeah it went well. Now isn’t a... _ super _ time to try to explain it but I should catch some free hours after drills- can I meet up with you by the lake to talk about it?”   
Finn nods. “Sure,” he answers. “That’s no problem.” He smiles. “They don’t have you running too hard, do they?”   
Poe shakes his head. “Nah,” he answers. “No worse than usual. We’re scoping new base locations- the First Order knows we’re here now and we want to hustle out to a new base.” Poe shrugs. “It’s a shame- this was a good spot, while we had it.”   
“Have you moved bases often?” Finn asks.

Poe shakes his head. “No more than anyone else- I did my training on a smaller base in the Outer Rim and some diplomatic stuff in the Hosnian-”

Poe stops, dead in his words. He turns a little pale.

Finn doesn’t say anything. He’s not sure what he could say. 

Poe blinks and he gathers up his papers. “I’m uh- I’ll be at- I’ll see you?” He says, getting up. 

Finn nods. “I’ll see you,” he answers, and watches Poe go.

* * *

 

Poe drops the briefing back with Lieutenant Connix, signs off on a maintenance request for a new filtration system on a ship in blue squadron and jogs off to make sure the maintenance checks on his own ship have gone through and are clear. He has a meeting with the unit that scouted through last week, just as he went under and then he jogs out, toward the lake.

It’s clear and deep. It’s not warm, like the water was on Yavin IV, but it’s nice to swim in anyway and it’s full of fish and flush with waterfowl. It makes Poe feel remarkable safe, this place so much like home but not quite home. 

Finn’s sitting on a rock out by the water, his pant legs rolled up and dangling in the lake. He hasn’t seen or heard Poe yet, he’s just...there.

Finn’s been up for about three weeks now- and Poe loves seeing him in moments like this. When he just  _ is _ . 

He walks onto the rock and sits down beside Finn. He tugs off his boots.

“Okay,” Poe says. “You probably have questions.”   
Finn nods, beside him. 

“So, I’m from Yavin IV,” Poe says. “Moon orbiting a gas giant in the Outer Rim. It was a rebellion base, years and years ago. I don’t know why, but there’s a...thing? People from moons around it, there’s an adaptation to something there, people have...complicated reproductive systems?” Poe finds himself rapidly approaching a wall in their mutual vocabulary. “You know what...what  _ sex _ is, right?”   
Finn looks over at him in clear irritation. “Poe,” he says, his voice containing the eyeroll that he is apparently vividly resisting. “I’m not  _ stupid _ .”

“Look, man, the other day you asked me if it were true that Alderaan had been developing a superweapon of its own and had been performing tests on inhabited, Imperial worlds. I don’t know  _ what  _ you know and this is...complex. I didn’t want to assume-”

“They told us what sex is, Poe,” Finn says. “How else do you adequately punish people for doing it?”

“They punished you if-?”

Finn nods. “Fraternization was strictly forbidden,” he says. 

Poe closes his eyes. He sighs. “So,” he says. “You know how...how some people have...some...parts?”

Finn nods. 

“Well,” Poe says. “I have...different ones? I have...ugh- look, for some reason, on the worlds orbiting Yavin, it’s advantageous for some people to have-” he sighs, heavily. “ _ Kriff _ \-  every twenty-ish days or so, I go through a state of enhanced...uh...fertility? Everything in my body wants me to  _ fuck _ and get knocked up. So, I’ve got...I’ve got a cock, but I’ve also got equipment that lets me get pregnant and have a kid. And it goes absolutely off the wall every once in a while and it makes me loopy and tired and horny and more or less  _ useless _ for anything for three days to a week.”

Finn doesn’t say anything for and bit, and then he says, “Is that why you smelled different?”

Poe blinks. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s one of the things it does. It makes me smell available to people. BB-8 stands guard because I wanna get laid and people wanna lay me when it happens.”

“Is it a big deal?” Finn asks. 

Poe shrugs. “Depends who you ask. It happens not infrequently where I’m from, something like one in two thousand people. It doesn’t affect my life too much and everyone on base is pretty respectful of it.”

“Okay,” Finn says. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Yeah,” Poe says. “Yeah. It’s just kind of gross, the process of it, and I didn’t want to talk about it at breakfast. Lunch. Whatever.”

“And it happens to you  _ every twenty days _ ?” Finn asks, sounding absolutely  _ flabberghasted _ .

“It’s different for everyone,” Poe says. “Some people get it less often, some people more. Mine floats but for the past few years, it’s been at twenty days.”   
“Oh,” Finn says. “What makes it float?”

Poe feels himself turn pink. He’s a grown ass man. He’s been sexually active since he was twenty; he shouldn’t be embarrassed by this. “If I’m in a relationship it happens less often,” he says. “If I’m seeing something, regularly.”   
Finn raises his eyebrows. 

“That sounds...inconvenient,” Finn says.

Poe sighs, laughing. “Yeah,” he replies.


	3. Chapter 3

Poe loves the way he feels as he takes off, fighting the local gravity of the planet he’s on. He loves how his head goes light, how his fingers go a little numb from his grip on the controls, he loves how it feels as his stomach sinks, deep into his pelvis, body pressed down by the energy of rising up suddenly, from nowhere. He loves it. He lives for it. It feels like so many things- the suspended silence of it is the singularly most important, the most  _ real _ sensation that Poe feels. Poe wants to feel it all the time.

Poe fights gravity when he’s on D’qar’s atmosphere and then he fights weightlessness once he makes it into space. 

“Alright, BB,” he says, and the astromech  _ chirps _ back. “Let’s go buzz the Outer Rim.”

It’s just a scouting run- nothing diplomatic, nothing involving intrigue. It’s Poe’s favorite kind of mission, where he just flies and BB-8 takes information, takes notes. There’s not much of it that’s work; it’s just flight and conversation with BB-8. 

Poe flies, first time in the cockpit in weeks, and he feels bright and sharp and free.

* * *

 

Rey places her hands on the ground and rocks forward to rest her head on the small cushion on the ground. She moves slowly, carefully, and swings her body upward at last to balance on her head and the palms of her hands. And she takes a deep, steady breath and she lets her eyes flutter closed and the sound of her blood rushing to her head silence the sound of the ocean all around her.

She focuses on that internal sound and the inertia left from moving; she lets it place her within herself, lets her process herself as a closed, singular entity separate utterly from the flow of things external to her. She tries to understand herself, a circuit whose blood flows in an endless loop, in this upside down space.

It’s  _ terribly _ uncomfortable.

She feels someone knock her knees though and then the whole feeling goes wrong and she topples, from upside down to horizontal on her back. She hisses- the ground here is unforgiving stone, not padded by sand or soil- and opens her eyes.

Master Skywalker looks at her, amused. “You’re trying too hard,” he says. “And you’re doing it wrong.”

Rey feels herself frown before she can stop it- it comes so naturally to her. And then she exhales and lets her face fall into a neutral expression and she looks up at him and says, “Master?”

“If you work this hard at it, you’ll never get there,” he says. “And if you have to stand on your head to do it, it’ll never do you any good.”

Rey looks up at him, from where she lays. “I can’t make it quiet here,” she says. “The ocean is too...it repeats, like an engine.”

“Rhythmic,” Master Skywalker says. 

“It’s rhythmic,” she says. “It invades and I can’t find how it fits against the sound of my blood.”

“If your focus is on the sound of your blood, what will happen if you can’t hear it?” He says.

Rey sighs. 

“It’s okay that’s it’s hard,” he says. “You can do it.”

“I’ll try,” she says.

Master Luke closes his eyes, smiles, almost to himself. “Do or do not. There is no ‘try,’” he says. And he chuckles, and he sits, across from Rey.

Rey sits up. 

“Take a deep breath, with me,” he says. “I was never good at this, myself.”

* * *

 

Finn stretches, and then he heads to central command, where he has a meeting.

He walks into the central command building, so nervous he’s having trouble keeping himself from shaking. He’s been here before, but never without Poe. He still feels, so acutely, like he doesn’t really belong here yet. He can still feel something like his armor over himself, what made him anonymous in the First Order making him stand out here. He feels like an enemy, like a risk, like an interloper.

He feels false, in this space, and he’s waiting for someone to realize. 

“Ah,” he hears. “Finn.”

He turns around and he salutes and falls into attention, automatically. All at once. 

“At ease,” he hears, and he steps into parade rest.

General Organa sighs. “Finn,” she says. “We don’t train our operatives that way and although I’m very flattered, this is unnecessary. Relax. Follow me.”

He follows her through the control base and into a small office. There’s a couch with a wrinkled blanket and pillow on it. A huge desk, carved of some kind of wood, covered thoroughly with papers. 

“Please,” she gestures. “Take a seat.” She putters about, behind the desk, turning on a kettle and pulling two mugs out of a drawer. “Do you drink tea?”

Finn frowns. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never had it before.”

General Organa sighs heavily. “No, I don’t suppose you have. I’ll make you some but if you don’t like it, I’ll finish it for you. It can be an acquired taste.”

“Thank you,” he says, looking up at her.

“So,” she says. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to divulge anything-  _ everything _ \- you remember about the First Order.”

“Ma’am?” Finn asks.

She pours water into the mugs and hands one to him. She leans against her desk- it occurs to Finn that he’s never seen her sit down- and she says, “We’ve never successfully captured a Stormtrooper alive. It’s made getting information quite difficult. We have spies- Commander Dameron is one of our most effective- but there are limits, to what they can glean and what we can meaningfully gather. Anything you might remember- anything- could be invaluable to our effort.”

Finn feels the heat of the water through the walls of the mug, sinking into his fingers. “I was just in sanitation,” he says. “I...cleaned things up.They didn’t entrust us with valuable information.”

“You were on Jakku,” she says.

“Jakku needed cleaning,” Finn answers, shrugging. “There was a mess there and they sent us to take care of it.”

Leia frowns. “So when you say sanitation, you don’t mean cleaning halls or buildings,” she replies.

Finn shakes his head. “Assignments in maintaining hygienic environments was done on rotations and as tier one punishment. We were in charge of other...messes. We were trained for other messes. I was.”

General Organa leans a bit, to catch his eyes. Hers are warm and bright. There is something deeply comforting to her gaze, to the warmth of the mug in his hands, to the smell of her in this small space- more special than just an office.

“That is helpful information,” she says. “Honestly, anything you remember. If you’re comfortable, I’d like to have a droid- C-3PO, ideally, to record and transcribe this conversation.”

Finn nods. “If you’re sure...if you’re sure it would help.”

She nods. “Would you be comfortable talking some more today?”

Finn takes a sip of the tea.

He’s not sure if he likes it or not. It’s earthy and strange, but he likes the way it makes him warm all the way through to his chest. 


	4. Chapter 4

Master Luke is quiet, all the hours of the day, except for when he’s not. 

Rey will be sitting, on the beach or at the table or she will be standing or she will be laying or she will be running her body through exercises with her staff, and there will be no one. There will be silence and there will be nothing, and then suddenly, Master Luke will be there. Gentle voice guiding her into the focused but tender place she’s coming to associate with the force. Firm but kind hands, pulling her spine straight, her shoulders down. Master Luke is quiet, Master Luke is hands-off, except for when he isn’t, and it turns out he isn’t so much more than Rey is used to.

Falling into a rhythm of  _ living _ with someone takes practice. It doesn’t come naturally to her anymore. She’s not used to someone making her dinner or breakfast; she’s not used to someone quietly starting a conversation beside her. 

There’s something to how Master Luke does it, though, that makes her realize that maybe he doesn’t know how to be apart. He doesn’t know how to not do these things, how to not live with someone. There’s something so hungry, so eager to how he does it. 

Rey isn’t sure how jedi are supposed to be, but she realizes that maybe it’s not quite like  _ this _ .

She’s sitting, her back against a stone wall, and she’s got her eyes soft, focusing distantly on the horizon. The sound of the ocean is there, a rhythm, but she does her best to shake it. She does her best to stop listening and to  _ feel _ , because the Force--

A few days ago, maybe a week or more, she’d been eating breakfast and Master Luke had asked her.

“I know this is...personal,” he’d said, measuring his words carefully. “I understand, if you don’t want to share it. But to you, the Force. How does it feel?”

And she’d realized, with her mouth full of fish, that she didn’t  _ know _ . She didn’t know what to say or what it was. But the question, it’s settled into her bones, and something to it, it helps. 

It helps her stop listening for it and start feeling for it; the two things different enough she can actually distinguish them. 

Soft eyes. 

Feeling, not listening. 

And she’s feeling, and suddenly: she’s not feeling the back of the wall pressed against her but the seat of a cockpit. And it’s not the gravity on world she’s feeling it’s the way gravity feels breaking through space, darting through corners. It’s an agile feeling, a dancing feeling. An emotion she realizes isn’t fully hers fills her to her lungs, leaving her gasping and bright, suddenly. Feeling, not listening, and she realizes that this isn’t quite the force she’s feeling but it is something the force brought her to. 

She smiles, unable to help it. Rich with the borrowed feeling. She feels it, and then she  _ hears _ it and--

“BB-8?” She asks, and the only response she gets is the feeling stops and she’s back onworld, bounded by gravity, not feeling anything but confused.

She blinks a few times, and she inhales, long and steady. She feels stiff. The electricity, the fluid feeling, has all gone from from limbs. She stands, and grabs her staff from the wall, and she faces the sea, and tries to keep her eyes soft, her mind clear, and while rolling with the feeling of the staff, she tries to feel, again.

* * *

 

Poe’s flying, coming round a smattering of asteroids, buoyed on stolen momentum and slingshot-gravity, when he suddenly feels  _ unalone _ in the cockpit. 

He never feels alone all the way; he’s close to BB in an intractable, deep sort of way. But this is different. The only feeling he can really begin to compare it to was the feeling he had sitting in his mother’s lap, her hands wrapping over his as they pilot soft, low orbits around Yavin. There’s someone else here, and they feel the same joy at it all. He rolls a few times, to feel not only the way it leaves him breathless and carefree but also--

The someone there with him, they feel it to. Poe finds himself laughing, because to share something like this is to make it all the more real. And he’s smiling and then--

BB-8 says something, and he turns, just barely, to ask her to repeat it, but it’s not quite his voice and not quite his mouth that asks her name, and then the feeling is gone. 

He shakes his head. 

“You feel that?” he asks. 

BB-8 chirps a negative. 

“Kriff,” he murmurs. “Okay. That was...spooky. You think we scouted enough for the day? See all we’re gonna see?”

BB-8 comments that if they keep going, they’ll run out of fuel, and she’ll be forced to render Poe for his components. 

Poe snorts a laugh. “You been listening to old war stories from the K2 units again?”

BB-8 chirps that she has  _ not _ under  _ any _ circumstances been doing such a thing. 

“You’re a bad liar,” he says. “I should know; I’ve seen your circuits.” He rolls his neck and shoulders. His helmet it beginning to feel heavy. Time to call it a day-- sixteen hours is officially enough time in the cockpit. “Set guidance systems for home,” he says. “Let’s head in.”

BB-8 whistles back an  _ okey dokey!  _ And space stretches, the way it does, and they jump into hyperspace, heading for D’quar.

They’re heading in, maybe ten minutes into the jump, when BB-8 asks,  _ Rey _ ?

Poe blinks a couple times. “Didn’t get to meet her much. Made quite the impression on you, though, eh?”

_ No, _ BB-8 answers,  _ Rey here? Felt Rey here. _

Poe frowns. “Just me,” he says. 

But he finds himself thinking, back to the feeling. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who's still gay and still really really loves star wars (it's me)


End file.
